Red Manse
by siqwithaQ
Summary: Stuck far from home during a storm, Marco and Thatch should consider themselves lucky to find someone willing to let them room in their home overnight. However, it isn't long before they start to think that something is wrong with their boarders.


Disclaimer: One Piece isn't mine!

Always wanted to write a horror fic, so why not try to for Halloween?

EDIT: I didn't really like how it was before, since most of it was rushed to be up for Halloween. Therefore, I've extended it! Yay! Also, if I remember, I'm changing the title, since I couldn't think of a good one before.

* * *

"Terrible weather, that's all I'm saying," Thatch Newgate complained from the passenger seat. "Terrible, terrible weather."

Marco Newgate sighed and ran a hand through his hair. As he squinted to see past the water on the windshield, he couldn't help but agree with the other man. Terrible weather indeed. The _terrible_ component was trying to keep control of the car – not that Thatch would know, as he had left that part up to his half-brother.

"I mean, rain I understand. But harsh rain dotted with hail and winds strong enough to nearly top-size the car when it was empty? This is no weather. This is the Curse of the Christmas Tree," Thatch muttered, perturbed.

The driver snorted at the thought. The 'Curse of the Christmas Tree' was just another workplace rumor spawned from happenstance. Every year, the boss sent someone on the all-important mission of picking out a Christmas Tree for the office, and every year, something occurred that prevented him or her from getting said tree. The unlucky person would continue to try (and due to extenuating circumstances, fail) until they finally managed to bring one back – quondam, sometime after New Years. This year, their boss was trying to "Beat the Curse" by sending the two of them out to the woods to cut down a tree earlier than usual. Specifically, the end of October, instead of the usual late November or early December. It was all ridiculous, of course.

An arborescent streak of lightning crackled ominously overhead.

_But then again…_

"And now there's lightning!" Thatch stated dramatically. "How wonderful. We're having a **wonderful** day, with **wonderful** weather. Isn't it _wonderful_, Marco?"

You'd have to have been a deaf and blind man halfway across the world with your hands covering your ears not to have heard the sarcasm in that speech.

Rain covered the windscreen, obscuring their vision, and Marco felt a pang of sadness for the loss of their windshield wipers, which had broken a few months ago in an accident that their coworker Haruta swears she had nothing to do with.

Unfortunately, that meant that he couldn't see until the last second that he was about to crash.

"…So," Thatch said as they stood outside the totaled car a few minutes later, "what to do now?"

Marco spared one last, forlorn look at the automobile, the front end of it crumpled like paper against a sturdy tree-trunk. It was an old car, and it didn't have any heating, but at least it had a roof. Finally, he answered, struggling to be audible above the howling winds, "We find somewhere to wait out this weather."

First, they checked the car for anything they needed to take with them. They were gladdened when they found an umbrella in the back, but it was quickly shot when the aged and brittle thing cracked under the shower's pressure. They left without it, carrying only a flashlight, money, their phones, and some extra jackets they found under a seat. The flashlight burnt out after twenty minutes, the jackets were soaked through after only ten, their phones couldn't get signals so far from society, and the paper money must have been soggy in their pockets, but it was something.

Thirty minutes into their trek, the rain only worsened and the hail pelted them hard enough to sting through their layers of coats. Mud from the beaten trail they had previously driven on caked their boots, their starting point far behind them as they shivered. Icy wind encircled them and Thatch shook his head to free himself of the gale's hollow voice.

"I'm telling you, it's the Curse!" he had to shout to be heard.

"Save your voice!" was the yelled response. After a pause, "And you're being irrational!"

Thatch huffed.

At that moment, a great clap of thunder nearly split the Earth. _Just like when Dad yells,_ he thought to himself and smirked. Not that he was very often on the receiving end of the man's anger, but he heard it often enough at their work place, seeing as he was their employer. You could call it nepotism, if they weren't so honestly good at their jobs.

Then, a miracle ensued, as that same thunderclap that nearly split the Earth split the sky instead. The clouds parted, and the day's waning light showed them that they had arrived in a clearing.

It would be nighttime soon, and they were lost in a forest.

With the last vestiges of sunshine to see, Marco spotted a large house a ways away. He grabbed his brother – whom was still thanking whatever deity was watching over them for their thaumaturgy – by the collar and forcibly dragged him.

Thatch made a choking, sputtering noise in the back of his throat as it was constricted, and sped to catch up. He was surprised as he saw the home Marco had noticed barely a minute ago.

_Why on Earth would someone _live_ in this forest? It's notorious for its terrifying weather patterns. Unless, it's abandoned?_

Such was not the case. When Marco knocked, the door was opened by a boy who could not have been more than fifteen years old.

The boy had black hair, slightly grown out and curling at the middle of his neck. His grey eyes surveyed them with a mix of curiousity and suspicion, and he exuded an aura of maturity and leadership that contrasted with the freckles on his face, which gave him an air of youthful insouciance.

"…What do you want?" he finally asked, eyeing their drenched clothes with distaste. They looked like drowned rats.

"Our car crashed a while from here," Marco explained, "We walked about half an hour in the rain and we found your home. Could we use your phone?"

"No." The door slammed shut.

Thatch and Marco stood shocked for a moment, then they heard some yelling from inside before the door opened again.

"Sorry about that," a different boy greeted them. He looked the same age as the first, but he was blond with blue eyes, and a chipped tooth was visible as he grinned at them. "My brother is a little untrusting of strangers. Why don't you come in?"

As they entered the front room of the house, they saw the first boy hovering by another doorway, watching them.

The second, friendlier boy looked them over. He stated, "You're going to catch a cold in those clothes. I'm sure you would be much more comfortable if we fetched you something of our father's or grandfather's to wear. Ace, would you?"

The first boy – Ace – only snorted.

"_Ace,_" the blond repeated with exhortation.

Ace rolled his eyes but nodded and marched away, presumably to get some clothes for them.

"So, what is it you needed?" the boy asked them.

"Can we use your phone?" Thatch asked, and saw the teen grimace.

"Our phone gets cut off during storms like these, but it'll be reconnected in the morning. It always is. Would you like to stay the night?" he offered.

The half-brothers glanced at each other, silently conferring, before nodding.

In the next few minutes they all introduced themselves – the blond was named Sabo – before Ace returned with some towels and apparel. They were shown to a bathroom to dry off and change. It felt good to be back in dry clothes, no matter how old and anachronistic they were. They most likely belonged to the grandfather.

Ace and Sabo lead them through a corridor that had cobwebs in the corners, and they entered a large dining room. Ace flipped a switch and a chandelier above their heads flickered with light. The room was elaborately decorated, with dark red walls, gold trimming, and an elongated table covered in a white tablecloth was the focus of the room. If you looked closely, you could see some faint food stains on the table cover. A large bouquet of only slightly drooping flowers made up the centrepiece, and the carpet was fleur-de-lis print. The wall trimmings had an intricate pattern that neither of them could make out from afar. A third boy – younger than the other two, with coal-coloured hair – was (_asleep?_) in a chair, face down on the table.

"We already ate, but we can whip something up for you if you're hungry," Sabo volunteered as Ace moved to wake the young boy at the table.

"We're fine," Marco said, eying the hitherto sleeping boy, who was now rubbing his eyes and yawning.

"Who are they?" the drowsy boy asked.

"Luffy, these are Marco and Thatch, they'll be staying here overnight. Marco and Thatch, this is Luffy, our younger brother," Sabo explained.

"How many people _are_ there in this house?" Thatch asked. "You three, however many more siblings you may have, your parents, you mentioned your grandfather–"

"Actually," Luffy corrected, "it's just us three here. And you."

There was a short-lived hush. Then, Marco asked, "What about your parents? You're too young to be on your own, and you have your father's clothes here, since you gave us them…"

"No," Sabo interrupted. "We don't live with anyone else anymore."

"And we're _glad_ for it!" Ace suddenly proclaimed.

"Ace…" Sabo shook his head sadly. He looked about to continue, but Ace beat him to it.

"Don't you start with that again! You know as well as I do that we are better off **without** _that man_!"

"What exactly did the guy _do_ for you to dislike him that much?" Thatch asked, and in retrospect, it was a rather foolish question.

Sabo's eyes widened as he looked at them, and Ace seemed to seethe in anger before storming towards the door. Luffy, however, merely hummed, his legs swinging back and forth vacuously, before answering, "Papa made Mama hurt."

That made Ace freeze in his tracks, as well as the other three occupants of the room wince. It was a childish and simple statement, but it said more than it needed to. The moment was saturnine and quiet.

Sabo cleared his throat. "Excuse me, could you both please step out for a while? You can show yourselves around the house. The three of us need to have a little _talk_."

And step out they did.

They walked back through the red, cobweb filled corridor and conversed with each other.

"So, what do you think of them?"

Marco gave his brother a bored look. "I think they're dealing with a lot of stress."

"Stress?"

"Yeah. Did you not just hear how there was domestic abuse between their parents?" he pointed out.

"I **know** that, but…" Thatch seemed to be searching for the right words. "…didn't something seem odd about them? Anything at all?"

"The younger one was a little childish for his age, I suppose," Marco conceded. "He was, what, twelve? Thirteen? He acted like he was just a kid."

"No, no, there was something else."

Marco only shrugged as he opened a door. Reaching for the light switch, he found that the light wouldn't turn on. He flicked it a couple times, yet nothing. He stepped further into the room – possibly he had tried the wrong switch, and another was somewhere deeper in the room.

"I'll go see if there's a flashlight or something around we can use," Thatch told him as he left. Marco nodded and continued to squint, trying to see through the corporeal blackness that encompassed the room. It was no use.

He ran his hand along the wall, feeling for some kind of toggle, but stopped when he felt something wet on his fingers.

He lifted a brow in curiousity and made his way back to the hall, where it was brighter.

His hand was coated in something _red_.

Thatch returned before panic managed to set in and, without sparing a glance at Marco's fingers, turned on a lantern he had been carrying. It revealed the room to have plastic coverings over most of it, with paint cans, brushes and rollers littering the floor. The walls were coloured vibrant red with what was assuredly paint – still wet, too – except for one spot, a hand-shaped patch of missing paint, revealing beige underneath.

"Oops," Marco said, fear subsiding. "Looks like I ruined their paint job."

"_Looks like_ you should wash your hands before that dries," Thatch told him. "We'll find that bathroom again."

After that, the third dooor they opened was the powder room. Thatch left his brother to wash his own hands as he looked back at the other rooms.

The first deadended – a large bookcase blocked the doorframe. There was no way to get past it, save for…

Experimentally, Thatch pushed on the bookcase. It tumbled backwards into the room and Thatch – expecting other bookcases to fall in a domino effect – covered his ears and cringed. When he only heard one loud thump, he opened his eyes.

Without the bookcase blocking his sight, it was apparent that the room had walls of a red-orange hue, with dark blue shag carpetting. A dark red piano sat in the center of the desolate area, and the only other objects visible were piles of carelessly tossed away books cluttering the corners.

Thatch approached the piano and pressed a key, frowning when it made a horribly _off_ sound. He opened the top to check it, and jumped when he found a butcher's knife embedded into the wood inside, narrowly missing severing several strings. He dropped the lid and backed away slowly, tripping over the forgotten bookcase that still lay on the ground. He swiftly scrambled to the next room and hoped that the noises that had resonated from that room had not brought anyone running.

The walls of this room were pale red. Dark mahogany shelves lined them, and marionettes sat upon those. Each marionette had a distinct face of its own, from one with dark skin and an elongated nose reminiscent of Pinochio, to one with baby blue eyes and uniquely sinuous eyebrows frozen in a slightly angered look, to one dressed in a nineteenth century style ruffled black dress and pink hair. A model ship in a bottle sat on the floor of the room, the bottle broken and the hull of the ship covered in random, messy streaks of paint in a rainbow of colours. The sails were red.

"There you are," Marco called from behind him. "I was looking for you. What's this room again? I didn't get a good look at it."

Thatch shook his head and closed the door. "It's nothing interesting. Let's check out the next one."

What lay behind that door was unexpected.

There was… almost nothing. The walls, ceiling, floor, all of it was painted an ugly beige – peculiar, as every other room in the house had been some shade of red – except for a large, dark red stain in the middle of the room. Something, someone, lay in the middle of it. The rest of the room was barren.

"Okay," Marco admitted, "You... may have been right about something being off about those kids."

Thatch tore past him, picking up the girl. Marco waited with shaking hands as his brother observed her with astonishment.

"She's… a doll!"

"Now is _not_ the time to be commenting on her appearance!" Marco snapped.

"No, I mean…" Thatch looked up at him. "She's not a real person. She's a life sized _doll_."

"…What?"

He came closer, and sure enough, her features were molded and shaped, unmovable, her skin flawless, her hair a strange texture unbefitting real human hair, and no breath heaved her chest. She was a doll.

"But why would…" he trailed off as he noticed writing on the wall. He moved nearer, and was able to read the words that looked as if they had been carved out with a nail. _Red Herring_, they said. _Red Herring Red Herring,_ over and over and over again.

As Marco continued to examine the words, finding little variation between them, Thatch moved on to the next room.

It took him a moment to work the door. It was sticky and stiff, and something heavy was blocking it from the other side. When the door _did_ open, whatever had been blocking the door clattered – it had fallen down a stairwell. A horrendous smell assaulted his nose. Pushing the odor to the back of his mind, he turned on the light and descended the stairs. As the smell grew stronger, an inchoate understanding began to form in his head. The contents of the room confirmed all his suspicions.

As he gazed at the mangled thing, terror grew in him and clawed at his thoughts, refusing to let him think rationally. He took a few breaths in an effort to calm down but his heart was still beating a mile a minute and he couldn't take the silence and _Dear God he needed to breathe why couldn't he breath?_

"Ah~" a childish voice said. "You found Papa."

He spun on his heels and found Luffy standing behind him. Ignoring the body that lay only a meter or two from his feet, he chuckled anxiously to hide his trepidation – and failed.

"Um, I was actually just about to leave. My, um, my phone has signal now! Yeah! So, I'm just gonna grab Marco and, um, leave–"

"Uh–Ohhhh," the boy drawled. "_Uh_–Ohhh!" he held his face in his hands and looked at him as if he had said the most shocking thing in all the world. "He found Papa, and now he wants to _leave_!"

"We can't have that, can we?" Thatch stopped dead and turned again, slowly, and found Ace leaning against the wall, arms crossed over his chest and eyes shadowed.

"No," A third voice said, and Thatch swallowed roughly, audibly, and mechanically rotated to face his wake. Standing there, in between him and the body, was Sabo, who merely smiled politely at him with his hands joind behind his back. "We can't have that at all."

Marco finally found a change in the scratching, where _Red Herring_ had descended into frantic scribbles of _MAMA MAMA_ when a nauseating scent permeated the room. It was a scent any human could instinctively recognize.

_That was the scent of __Death_.

He really should learn not to underestimate that curse.

* * *

It was in the early workday when the phone rang in an uneasy Edward Newgate's office.

"Hello?" His concern edged its way into his voice as he answered.

"Dad?" He was abated by the voice of his son replying.

"Marco! Thank goodness. We've been worried for you two all night. What happened? Why didn't you call?"

"Sorry about that. We got stuck in a storm with no signal, so we couldn't call anyone. I spent the night in a 24-hour gas station and the phones just started working again. Can you send someone to pick me up?"

"What happened to the car?"

"It's a little… inoperable."

Edward sighed. Why did the young ones always have to go breaking things? First Haruta with the windshield wipers, then that Girl Scout who accidentally set his doorbell on fire (don't ask how), and now this.

"Yes, that won't be any trouble. I'll send Namur to get you, as he actually knows _how_ to drive."

He smirked at the indignant sound from the receiver.

After noting the gas station's address, he hung up and looked out the window. The one thing he could he honestly did not like about his office's location was that it was across the street from a cemetery. His eyes softened as he watched three boys – Two with black hair and one blond – pay their respects to a grave.

What he did not see was that the name carved into that very grave was _Thatch Newgate_.

* * *

Somewhere far away, there was a dining room, with the light from the chandelier flickering above. The room was elaborately decorated, with dark red walls, gold trimming, and an elongated table covered in a white tablecloth was the focus of the room. If you looked closely, you could see some faint food stains on the table cover. A large bouquet of only slightly drooping flowers made up the centrepiece, and the carpet was fleur-de-lis print. A boy was (_asleep?_) in a chair, face down on the table. The wall trimmings had an intricate pattern of two words painstakingly carved in calligraphy over and over and over again.

_Red Herring_

_Red Herring_

* * *

A/N: Was it good? Give me the best feedback you can, because I love meaty reviews!


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